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2017 HSR&D/QUERI National Meeting

Call for Abstracts
Abstracts are due April 7, 2017Authors will be notified of decisions the week of May 22

HSR&D is planning a combined HSR&D/QUERI National Conference for July 2017 in the metro DC or Baltimore area (date and location are tentative). The meeting will be hosted by HSR&D's Center for Health Information and Communication, located at the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis. The 2017 conference theme is "Accelerating Innovation and Implementation in Health System Science."

Investigators who are engaged in health services research focused on improving the health and healthcare of Veterans are invited to submit abstracts for presentation at this conference, preferably in one of the subject areas below. Please note that due to meeting approval guidance, we anticipate the meeting will be smaller in scale and with fewer presentations than in past years.

Access to Care

Aging, Long-Term Care, and Informal Caregiving

Care Coordination: VA and non-VA Care and Benefits

Disparities in Health and Healthcare

Health Promotion, Care Management, and Veterans' Experience

Healthcare Informatics

Implementation Science, and Adoption, Fidelity, and Dissemination of Effective Practices

Mental and Behavioral Health

Pain Management

Performance, Efficiency, and Value

Scientific Methodology

Special Populations

Workforce and Employee Engagement

Selection criteria include quality, timeliness, and relevance to the conference theme and VA mission.

The meeting will accommodate the following four formats, each requiring a different type of preparation and form of presentation. Investigators submitting abstracts will be asked to indicate their preference for presentation format, but final decisions will be made by the Review Committee.

1. Panel. The panel has a moderator and three panelists addressing a single topic—the same topic for all panelists—that is determined by the panel. Panelists present their views, evidence, etc., promoting reactions and discussion from the other panelists, as well as the audience during the course of a 90-minute session. The panel may provide a debate, complementary views, synergies, or other types of perspectives, via conversation among the panel members. Discussion may focus on innovations, methods, partnerships, research directions, policies, or other important areas. Panelists may be researchers, clinicians, policymakers, or operations experts in VA or non-VA settings. Panels containing both researchers and their partners ("Partnered panel", below) will receive priority.

a. Partnered panel. This panel contains one or two operations or program leaders, and one or two researchers (total of three panelists, plus a moderator), who work or worked together in pursuit of a shared goal addressing major priorities of current VA and VHA leadership. The panel will discuss operational and research priorities, including key policy priorities and/or key findings from recent research including clinical and implementation strategies to support scale-up and spread of effective practices, measurement science to identify/establish standardized performance measures, and key unanswered questions that research can answer, to inform future policy or program deployment. Among areas of special interest are:

b. Standard panel. A standard panel meets the criteria for a panel but not a partnered panel.

2. Workshop. The workshop session is a focused presentation and substantive training session about a methodological or programmatic area of interest to health services researchers or other health professionals. Workshops are usually 90 minutes in duration and include both didactic presentation and participants' involvement, with a focus on providing specific knowledge or skills for participants. In addition to peer-reviewed workshops, some workshops may be invited sessions. A workshop may have a maximum of three presenters.

3. Poster. The poster session will host posters accompanied by their authors for an assigned period of time, usually 90 minutes. Posters report projects that can be readily summarized in graphical form, such as through tables, pictures, graphs, or other figures.

4. Oral Presentation. The oral presentation session is a collection of related research presentations. The presenter is allotted approximately ten minutes to present, with five minutes at the end of each presentation for a question-and-answer exchange with the audience.

Individuals may submit a maximum of two first-authored abstracts across all formats. Submitters will be asked to identify the presenters during the abstract submission process. Each abstract will be evaluated by expert reviewers who will be blinded to authors' identities. Abstracts with the highest scores and greatest relevance to the meeting theme will be selected. All decisions regarding abstracts will be made by the Review Committee and will be final. Authors will be notified of decisions the week of May 22.

For panels, travel funds will be provided for the moderator and all panelists. For workshops, travel funds will be provided for all presenters. For posters and oral presentations, travel funds will be provided for the lead presenter of each accepted abstract (as indicated during the submission process).